2024 September❮❮prevnext❯❯

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Cracked.com tells the story of Joy Milne - as a kid she'd play games of identifying varieties of rose by their respective smells, and later on as a nurse she discovered an ability - like canines - to detect various diseases, including Parkinson's (notoriously hard to diagnose early) which led to a reliable skin swab test.

It reminds me of a party-trick the physicist Richard Feynman had, where he would ask folks to touch just one book on a shelf when he was out of a room, then he would come back and identify the book by smell alone.

Famously, the sense of smell goes way back in the brain, and connects to emotional centers more directly than most of our other sensors, but it's challenging to learn to trust it - you can't pinpoint a source like you can with sight or touch or sometimes sound, acclimation happens quickly, it all seems so subjective, but maybe most importantly it's hard to quantify the sensations and put them into words. (I do think verbalization is an important part of cognition for most of us - language is the structure with which we build thoughts, not just describe them after the fact.) Also we associate so many smells with negative things - like even the Feynman story seems a little gross, there's an instinctive revulsion about it... I guess it's just a part of how we are part of our environment - the boundaries aren't as precise as we would like.

Super low-key month for new-to-music. "Important" is a charmingly geeky philosophical novelty song. "Pledging My Love" was realizing that Johnny Ace was a real performer, not someone Paul Simon made up for his ballad to John Lennon's death "The Late Great Johnny Ace".

4 star:
* WILDFLOWER (Billie Eilish)
* EP. 4: Important (Ian McConnell)

3 star:
* Seven Nation Army (Epic Instrumental Version) (Phoenix Music)
* Want You Gone (Aperture Science Psychoacoustic Laboratories)
* Scenario (feat. Busta Rhymes, Dinco D & Charlie Brown) [LP Mix] (A Tribe Called Quest)
* Pledging My Love (Johnny Ace)
* Do It (Jesse Winchester)
* Antidote (Orion Sun)
* Money (Cardi B)

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Random question about emotional sharing:
When you are craving some one to listen to you and or vent to and or commiserate, what percentage is "just wanting to be heard/felt/seen/validated" vs... I dunno, mostly just hoping the stressor will go away?

Lemme know!

For me I feel it's 1/3 the former 2/3 the latter. I'm always willing to listen, but I don't always want to vent, at least not to an individual - I'm sort of too aware that being reminded they are likely helpless to materially help isn't a pleasant feeling for them...

Even validation- sometimes most usefully channeled as "it makes sense that you feel that way", which validates the feeling without necessarily agreeing to all parts of it - seems like it could backfire for me. I mean who wants to hear "boy that situation really does suck!" (or its opposite, "that's not so bad, people have it worse, buck up")

I dunno. I do feel blue today, and I sort of want people to hear about it. Maybe it's yet another ego thing; I want people to admire what a stalwart little muddler-through I am.

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Scientists making mech bodies for mushrooms...

uplift!
though I wonder if there's a sign of true intentionality? or is it like when you have plants make stock picks, but you don't really suspect they know what they're doing...
Also, it does make you wonder about reaction time (though I guess the video is sped up 10x). Like life at human speed must be ridiculously fast for most things.
(Also I think about the comic Supergod - one of the most pervasive deities was fungus based, who was kind of an avatar of death/rebirth...)

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The blues isn't about feeling better. It's about making other people feel worse.

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I lightly edited this transcript from Pieter Levels and Lex Friedman on the Lex Fridman podcast:

I'm seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like, what do you call it? Like wieldy, so it takes so much work to just maintain this code and then it updates to a new version. You need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.

Yeah, can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML... JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. And so that's a really simple stack, and you get stuff done really fast. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?

I think it's accidental, 'cause that's the thing I knew, like I knew PHP, I knew HTML, CSS, 'cause you make websites and when my startups started taking off, I didn't have time to... I remember putting on my to-do list like 'learn Node.js', 'cause it's important to switch, 'cause... This obviously is much better language than PHP, and I never learned it. I never did it, 'cause I didn't have time. These things were growing like this, and I was launching more project and I never had time. It's like one day, I'll start coding properly and I never got to it. -

I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still to do for me to really learn Node.js or Flask [or] React. It feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these, but you can get stuff done SO fast with vanilla versions of stuff.

Yeah, it's like software developers if you wanna get a job and it's like, you know, people making stuff like startups and if you want to be entrepreneur probably maybe shouldn't, right?

I wonder if there's like, I really wanna measure performance and speed. I think there's a deep wisdom in that. I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I'm not sure what to say about that, because definitely like you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C, for example. C++ when you're building systems engineering is like, there's a lot of benefits for pointer safety and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know, but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it.

Man, this is my most controversial take, I think, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like there's frameworks now that raise money. They raise a LOT of money. They raise 50 million, 100 million, 300 million dollars. And the idea is that you need to make the developers, the new developers, like when you're 18 or 20 years old, right? Get them to use this framework and add a platform to it. Where the framework can... It's open source, but you probably should use the platform which is paid to use it. And the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on DigitalOcean, right? So there's obviously like a monetary incentive here. We wanna get a lot of developers to use this technology and then we need to charge them money 'cause they're gonna use it in startups and then the startups can pay for the bills. It kind of destroys the information out there about learning to code because they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developer influencers is a big thing... And same thing what happens with like nutrition and fitness or something. Same thing happens in developing, they pay this influencer to promote this stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it. And then a lot of people are like, "Wow, use this." And I started noticing this 'cause when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, "What are you using?" I would say, "PHP, jQuery, why does it matter?" And people would start kind of attacking me like, "Why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?" And I say, "I don't know, 'cause this PHP thing works and I'm not really optimizing for anything, it just works." And I never understood like why, I understand there's new technologies that are better and there should be improvement, but I'm very suspicious of money. Just like lobbying. There's money in this developer framework scene. There's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencer or whatever. It can't all go to developers. You don't need so many developers for a framework, and it's open source. To make a lot of more money on these startups.

So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like, when you say better, it's like, can we get some data on the better? Because I wanna know from the individual developer perspective and then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers... Measure how productive they are in shipping features. How many bugs they create, how many security holes result.

PHP was not good with security for a while, but now it's good.

In theory, in theory- Is it though?

Now it's good.

No, now as you're saying it, I wanna know if that's true because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet. Is it just overrepresented? Same with WordPress? Yes, there's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular. It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex. Like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build a thing.

Man, 100%. And it's the same thing with big corporations. 80% of the people don't do anything. It's like- It's not efficient. Your benchmark is like people building stuff that actually gets done and like for society, right? If we wanna save time, we should probably use technology that's simple, that's pragmatic, that works, that's not overly complicated. It doesn't make your life like a living hell.

And use a framework one that obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you-

Of course, yeah, of course. I'm not saying you should code without a framework. You should use whatever you want. But yeah, think it's suspicious. And I think it's suspicious. When I talk about it on the Twitter, there's this army comes out. There's these framework armies.

I wanna ask the framework army, what have they built this week?

A couple thoughts -

yeah, some of the coding practices encouraged by early PHP *were* terrible (automatically converting CGI params to variables).

And honestly, I don't think Vanilla JS is is that bad to build with relative to jQuery, with a site like You Might Need jQuery you really can get done what you need to do. (Honestly I should look into what CSS libraries Levels uses - the shallow stuff is like 80% of the perception a site.)

Finally, I'm not quite as suspicious about the "follow the money" aspect as Levels is - or at least I'm more aware of the peer pressure aspect, that it feels like so many engineers have really learned to love their chains in terms of complexity... maybe it's a path to better job security somehow, maybe opinionated frameworks scale better for larger teams? But to me, it always seems to get in the way of getting things done in a way that's productive in the short term and maintainable over 5-10 years.

Levels view about the money involved reminds me of this 20 years old essay from Joel "Joel on Software" Spolsky, Fire and Motion. The first half is about the intermittent trouble of getting started being productive in a workday, but then he pivots to his time is an Israeli Paratrooper, where he learned the trick of Fire and Motion - keep moving and keep firing to make the other guy keep his head down. He writes:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That's probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features.

Sometimes it feels like the "flavor of the month" frontend webdev is a victim of some of that - along with engineers who are more interested in HOW something is done than what actually is done.

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New word of the day: "mentation", a fancy way of saying mental activity.

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We Got That Bike Bus - fun little video short from today's Peabody School

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How to Tell If You Are Running a Money Laundry
(Updated Election Edition)...

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this made me laugh out loud, on the subway

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Kerry Callen really has fun with parodies of 50s/60s style comic books My favorite:

(If you don't get the reference: Wikipedia for Jayne Mansfield–Sophia Loren photo)

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Les Fo'Plafonds - these guys are fun junk musicians - I love their - satisfaction - and they have Misirlou Second Amendment fans don't realize how the author of the Second Amendment absolutely saw guns as something that could be regulated by government. They will rarely acknowledge how it was relentless lobbying my gun makers that overturned centuries of understanding of the 2A as a collective right to a private one - and we keep on sacrificing kids to Our Great God Gun. Not even Trump getting winged by a shooter is enough to shake most of them.

In Gun We Trust!

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Happy 25th Anniversary of Dreamcast's North American release... (9/9/99)

What a gaming system!

Also this is one of the first time I noticed it shares a birthday with my dad... (would have been his 50th birthday when it launched...)

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ah good old capitalism...

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are you guys workin?
yes sir mr simpson! [typing]
could you ummm... work any harder than this?
sure thing boss! [typing intensifies]

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The limits of the current generative AI, and gearing students to be "AI resilient" instead of "AI ready".

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RIP James Earl Jones - what a voice!

"Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.

"I think you're crazy," was the way Clevinger had responded to Dunbar's discovery.

"Who wants to know?" Dunbar answered.

"I mean it," Clevinger insisted.

"Who cares?" Dunbar answered.

"I really do. I'll even go as far as to concede that life seems longer i--"

"--is longer i--"

"--is longer--IS longer? All right, is longer if it's filled with periods of boredom and discomfort, b--"

"Guess how fast?" Dunbar said suddenly.

"Huh?"

"They go," Dunbar explained.

"Who?"

"Years."

"Years?"

"Years," said Dunbar. "Years, years, years."

"Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?" Dunbar asked Clevinger. "This long." He snapped his fingers. "A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man."

"Old?" asked Clevinger with surprise. "What are you talking about?"

"Old."

"I'm not old."

"You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?" Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

"Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?"

"I do," Dunbar told him.

"Why?" Clevinger asked.

"What else is there?"

One again this feels like the vibe helping me embrace the grind at work.

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just got shot twice

When the debate lines up with Linus and Lucy Sound On

I've always enjoyed collecting quotes, where a big puddle of wisdom has been distilled into a shot of wisdom. Kottke linked to "The 365 Most Famous Quotes of All Time" (where the collector fights the good fight against the misattributions that are so common online)

Here are my favorites. One set I liked are all different takes on an idea I find crucial; the importance of guiding and channeling our reactions to the world, especially the parts we don't like:

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.

What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.

A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind, like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.

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Another set that resonated for me, especially right now, was about fear...

What would you do if you weren't afraid?

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

That last one is interesting, since it speaks to the fear generated by people worried about doing the wrong thing. But like I'll get to later, I'm worried by people who aren't worried about the wrong thing, who have self-granted permission to do what they want.

My dad would actually encourage me to fail growing up. I would come home from school and he would say to my brother and I: 'So what'd you guys fail at this week?' And if we didn't have something, he would actually be disappointed. I didn't realize it at the time, but he was just changing my definition of failure. My definition of failure became not about the outcome, but about not trying.

Failure is a massive part of being able to be successful. You have to get comfortable with failure. You have to actually seek failure. Failure is where all of the lessons are.

I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

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This next set is more of a mix, but about how to be in life in general:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.

Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do.

(Guess that last one is one of those work to live, don't live to work kind of thoughts)

The right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

That last one has a big implication for UX + Analytics. (Compare to the sometimes (mis-)attributed to Peter Drucker "You can't manage what you can't measure" A certain type of person craves the certainty vibe the accompanies some quantifications, and are willing to put "lies, damn lies, and statistics" aside.)

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

As a sometimes rambling speaker I appreciate that last one.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Damn, don't like that one! I'm more into "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted". You don't always have to be driven on by that will to accomplish.

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

I guess my main point is not missing "you gotta try to be right" even as you're not afraind to be wrong. (Just like, you gotta try to try and not just preemptively be at ease with failure)

Are you familiar with Whale Fall?

Here's a cool description from tumblr:

"With a "normal" whalefall, we're talking about something (a dead whale, to be precise) that lands in an EXTREMELY nutrient-poor environment, the deep ocean. It's not the equivalent of "a truck full of free hamburgers lands from the sky in the middle of your neighbourhood". This is an environment where an important part of the food chain is "marine snow", aka flakes of organic matter (including feces) that drift down from above, and they eat that because it's possible to get nutrients from it. So when a whole-ass (or partial-ass, because it's already been nibbled on from sharks and the like) whale carcass arrives, it is something MAJOR. It starts a whole new localized ecosystem, an oasis of life; those that eat the dead whale, those that eat those that eat the dead whale, and so on. And as the whale is consumed, the creatures there shift, leaving when there's nothing left that they'd eat, arriving when parts of the whale that they DO eat are now exposed, and it continues until the very bones have been devoured.
Whalefalls are fascinating."

The tumblr post goes on to think about a "Sky Whale Fall", the death of a celestial being that changed the magic / cryptid ecosystem in an eldritch horror kind of way.
But, here's a less fun play on the idea - some industries are going through some serious, serious party-over-hangovers - tech and other startups after the thrill of COVID-era zero interest rates, the film industry once the streaming bonanza started running out of steam... but maybe more worrisome, what if the entire introduction of the Internet was similar?

"The invention of the internet is like a whale carcass at the bottom of the ocean. It's an anomaly that lasted 50 years. A lifetimes-long anomaly. Long enough that people started and ended their career within its duration. Long enough that books about "business practice" were written by people who thought it was a new normal. When tech VCs try to apply their startup culture to biotech, scientists have to slowly explain to them that you cannot launch a crop alpha release in 18 months"

Sobering metaphor. Especially for a guy who started his career as the whale was just hitting the seafloor, and just got laid off again.

To all musicians, especially my fellow players that are the bass and base of their band:

Always remember - it's all about the One.

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Re: The attempts on Trump's life.
Every nation has its share of loose non compos mentis folks rattling around.
This nation is unusual in making sure said folks have access to guns.
This is the issue, not "TDS"

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Marriage is a prison that everyone's trying to escape into.

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War Is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and according to the Ohio GOP, Not Gerrymandering is Gerrymandering...
Truly egregious bullshit. Visiting my Mom and Aunt in New Jersey. Yesterday I joined them on a day trip to see "Daniel" at "Sight + Sound", a giant Audio/Visual extravaganza musical.

The story is of Daniel, his relationship with King Nebuchadnezzar, his buddies (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) the buddies' time in the furnace, and his time in the lion's den. (It plays a little loose and throws in some of the other prophets as well, but it all kind of works.)

But mostly it's difficult to express the epic scale of this production. "Sight + Sound" is a custom theater in Lancaster PA (they have a sister setup in Branson MO) and they take FULL advantage of the space - it starts with a huge extra wide stage- and then not too far into the show the side curtains drop and you see there's set on all 3 sides. They make tremendous use of video projection screens with clever interplay with huge pieces of mobile scenery... The opening scene is Nebuchadnezzar on his majestic royal bed while have a nightmare, the bed flying over a beautifully rendered scene of the city of Babylon - and the way they roll the physical bed structure in careful sync with the video - like what you thought was part of a physical set turns out to be part of the projection - while at the same time flying in a large on-brand Babylonian statue from the ceiling - it's jaw dropping.

Like I said, the scale of it - like BIG Broadway meets Vegas, almost more opera than musical - giant orchestra soundtrack played loud, a few live animals here and there - it made me think of the effect cathedrals, stained glass, and church services full of incense and mystery were said to have on worshippers, just working to instill a sense of awe.

The performances were great as well. I'm not much of a theater critic, but was impressed with the way they set the physically unimposing Daniel vs the truly burly Nebuchadnezzar and the prophets all with these majestic booming voices. (Though I did think it's odd there's no cast list in the program like most similar productions might have?)

Babylon was such a fortuitous setting for this treatment there's this brilliant "taking a boat through the Hanging Gardens waterways" that really leaves an impression. They made heavy use of the place's iconography, bearded kingly lion men statues and the like. Heck their song Babylon Creation (with its haunting, gravitas-laden refrain "There Is None Like Babylon / We Are One") tells that creation myth, the Dragon Tiamat vs Marduk - and kinda makes it look sorta cool?

I mean it's also a tool for getting a Christian message out, but they don't really beat you over the head with it - and it's not always easy to get a New Testament message out of an Old Testament story but they get there.

Here's a behind-the-scenes video they made about Creating Babylon.

Anyway, thanks to my folks for taking me! (We went via via a daytrip bus package with lunch at the Shady Maple Smorgasborg: "Experience the excitement of dining at the United States' largest smorgasbord, featuring 200 feet of deliciously authentic Pennsylvania Dutch cooking." (and a gift shop similarly scaled))

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this tale of science made me laugh

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I am glad this project [of digitizing my father's writing] is over, but I ended up welcoming the work, guiding these last phases of compression. My father needed a great deal of space, but now he takes up almost none. Almost. Death is a lossy process, but something always remains.

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This game has cost me a couple of relationships. My girlfriend said, "It's either me or the chess pieces, Marcel." So I looked at her, I looked at my chess pieces, I looked at her again. And the more I looked at her, the more I could see how toxic she was. The more I looked at my chess pieces, I could see lots of solitude. I said, "You know what? I'll talk to you later." I picked up my pieces, I left. I let a lot of frustration out on the chessboard. Because it's like life. It's got three parts. The opening, the middle, and the end. The opening part of your life goes from the time you were born until you're twenty-six. In the opening part, you want to develop as much as possible.
You want to go to school, start a career. Then you go from the opening to the middle. You want to work in your career maybe thirty years, get married, have kids. And then the end game is from age fifty on down. You say, "I'm not worried about nothing now. I'm coming to the park to play chess, drink some brandy, I'm going to talk to Raul or to Pedro." That's how chess is. That's how life is. And let me tell you something: people make mistakes early in their life. But that doesn't mean the game is over.

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How To Replace a Door Knob With a Hot Dog

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Huh, for some weird reason Republicans don't like helping people to register to vote.

Government by, of, and for the people, not just republicans, ya jerks.

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Heather Anne Campbell (a writer for Rick + Morty and a lot of other things) is one of the 3 hosts (all of whom have experience as improv comedians) of my favorite podcast "Get Played", about video games, and now I am pretty certain that a podcast with fans of a topic who are funny will beat a podcast of experts in the same topic. (Also I think 3 hosts works better than 2, especially when 2 is really "1 plus a sidekick.)

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I was thinking I needed some new pillows, but I think I'll pass on the "Nazi coded dog whistle" (14 and 88 are pretty damn well established pro-Nazi codes, and while I'm not saying Lindell himself is advocating Nazi, someone in his org definitely is, or at the very least having a laugh.)

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When times are tough I sometimes find it weird that my online media comfort food is a combination of pleated-jeans, cracked, and lamebook. All 3 are a bit low rent in terms of ads (less so lamebook) but they do a decent job of curating some of the funniest stuff while remaining catch-up-able; unlike instagram and tik-tok that really lean into doomscrolling. (And frankly tumblr has gotten a bit time consuming to try and keep up with)

Anyway, this pleated-jeans What-Happens-When gallery was pretty cool. A thing on if people can change.



I've definitely shown some inability to change, and its come to hurt me and some people I love. Though I guess with this video, I do want to point out that it's kind of taken for granted that the change can't be in what the person asking the other to change wants slash needs? It's taken for granted that the request for change is probably the right thing for both parties.

Like the video is right in pointing out people are who they are and do what they do for a complex bundle of reasons - so of course change is difficult because the request to change might be just one force factor among a myriad. (I mean sometimes the need to switch course is blatantly obvious, but other times it feels closer to making one self better for someone else.)

Some of forces that resist change are negative (though the video seem to imply that they're trauma informed, which isn't universally the case. Well, except for the fact that all life is full of the trauma of not being as good as we could imagine) but some are positive as well.

Sigh. I don't mean this to sound quite as defensive as it probably is.

I know one sticking point for me is not being proactively interested enough in others. Over the decades this has manifested from me seeming merely self-absorbed to a more relationship damning "just not that into you" - but for me, it's more like seeming rude to pry. Like to me it seems much safer and wiser to let people curate what they want to bring into the shared space, based on them judging their own needs to share, or what the other person would find interesting.

But not everyone has that knack for proactively sharing stuff. Maybe sometimes they don't think they're interesting enough? And especially they don't want to seem like a burden.

Ah well. Something to work on for me I guess, overcoming my midwestern urge not to pry, or my toxic masculinity-adjacent instinct to grapple with my own problems on my own, or my only-child willingness to share stuff that I hope other people will also find interesting (and assuming that more people join me in the last two categories)

But damn it's rough. Seems so easy to pry, or come across as too desperate and anxious to ask "what's wrong" when sometimes nothing is.

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Eddie Murphy imitates James Brown in front of James Brown.

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I was the other week years old when I noticed that Glass Joe - the typical first opponent in a "Punch-Out!" game - has a name that's probably a pun on "Glass Jaw".

(I have a theory that I have a "Glass Jaw" when I play Dr. Mario with my mom and aunt - I usually have an edge because my style is fast and opportunistic, but maybe not quite as defensive/responsive.)

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How to monetize your blog (a descent into madness)

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I made a new minimalist online survey/poll tool
kirk.is/polling
Definitely one of those "scratch an itch" projects - there are certainly other options out there, but this just gets the job done in a nice concise way - minimalist, but with a few bells and whistles (drag and drop ordering, color coding of results, etc)

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While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

I thought of this when someone linked to an article Is making friends as an adult really hard, or is it just me? - even though the topic of the quote is romance, I think the idea is similar.

I know friends and bands - and the two overlap mightily for me over the past decade - are the main things keeping me in Boston (other than inertia) instead of retreating to NJ with my folks (with the benefit of being with and also supporting them.) Having a bit of a lie-in reading Sally Rooney's new novel "Intermezzo".

Funny how some novels or maybe novelists just grab you? I suspect, as with my tastes in music, there are a few specific styles that easily draw me in; in music it's a song being bass heavy and with a funk-tinged, high-contrast beat. With a novel, I guess it's just a few notes of interior life framing moods and times that remind me of my own romantic travails.

I contrast that to what the book club I was in at work was choosing; the democratic choices leaned into middle-brow action-y murder mystery things. (There was one other person in the group who mirrored some of my own geeky preferences but the two of us were out numbered.) Like, at first I thought a scheduled monthly half-hour to discuss the book we just finished was ridiculously small, but given the heft of we were reading, it kinda made sense.

It seems like these books always have ex-military men and nurses. When I was at the gift shop of Shady Maple (the "US's Largest Smorgasbord") I saw a lot of military- and nurse- themed swag, like more so than for ther careers, and it kind of hit me that those were the heavily "most acceptable" prestige careers for men and women to respectively have as in terms of certain demographics.

Anyway, novels are a nice indulgence of funemployment, I wonder if I should branch out more. After Intermezzo I'm half tempted to reread "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", which I purchased recently just to quote a passage that has stuck in my head for a few decades.

I guess it's a question if reading fully deserves all it's vibe of being more rewarding than, say, swimming through social media. (And always fun to think back to when novels were seen as kind of a scandalous frivolity.)

I do find my patience for TV series to be thin. I'm not used to being quite that picky about things. I am half tempted to start a regimen of watching well-regarded movies I missed. (I carry the assumption that a good 2 hour movie will have a better "cool idea to time spent ratio" than even the best TV series, but I'm not sure if that's entirely true.)

Of course, I can't let myself get TOO used to this, and I should turn my attention and energies to doubling down on the job hunt. "Pretirement" - is that a word? - is just too seductive at times.

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also still Iove the iPad mini (2019/5th gen) as a reader. can read in a dim room, it's very responsive, I can do color highlights, easy to hold, and it's a drawing tablet as well

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Your honor, I DO have a drug problem: sometimes I run out of drugs.

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the origins of "going haywire" is scarier than you might think -

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my tuba is ready for the HONK lantern parade!

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